Enhancing dependability of combat vehicles

The introduction of the digital technology to the land combat vehicle also introduced the notion of architecture for the electronics system within the combat vehicle, called CVES (Combat Vehicle Electronics System). A decentralized architecture for CVES has the potential of delivering two capabilities which had been traded off in earlier designs. These capabilities are that of fault-tolerance and responsiveness-two essential characteristics of a dependable system. A formal framework is presented in this paper which allows one to express and to evaluate various approaches for enhancing dependability of CVES